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Funky Winkerbean, 11/25/21

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody! If you’re looking for something to be thankful for, maybe you should give thanks that you don’t have Funky Winkerbean’s entire family showing up at your front door and explaining to you who they all are, for some reason, as if it were very vital for readers at home to get a full accounting. I have to wonder if the Funky team has forgotten that Mort, the sex creep in Harry’s band full of old people, is supposed to be the same person as Morton, Funky’s dad? The band member in this month’s “Mort from Harry’s band is horny for Lillian” sequence sure looks like Funky’s dad in the “Funky’s dad is horny for Holly’s mom” sequence from December 2018:

And maybe it’s just the angle, but Funky’s dad’s head looks pretty differently shaped today? Plus why would Funky feel like he has to introduce his dad to Harry, since his dad is in Harry’s band? I guess it’s possible that, having put his dad in a home specifically so he could think about the old man as little as possible, Funky has not bothered to keep up at all with his dad’s hobbies or activities.

Gasoline Alley, 11/25/18

Gasoline Alley also went in for a crowd scene, but in a way that is frankly a lot less tasking for me. Do I recognize these people as mostly Gasoline Alley characters? Yes. Could I name them? Some, but definitely not all. Does the strip insist on telling me what they’re all named, because it’s a good bet that I’ve forgotten and it wants me to double down on remembering them? No, it doesn’t, and I appreciate that.

The Lockhorns, 11/25/18

Speaking of things I’m thankful for, I remain thankful for the acidic purity of The Lockhorns. A lesser strip would depict a character burning furniture for heat, whereas this one depicts a character burning furniture out of spite.

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The Lockhorns, 11/15/21

I’m really loving Leroy’s little bar cart here. You never know what room in the house you might be in when you abruptly need to theatrically pour yourself and a friend some hard liquor as you start griping about how much you hate your wife, so it’s good to be able to easily wheel your cocktail supplies from place to place.

Dennis the Menace, 11/15/21

“Get it, old man? What Christ was to you in your long-ago day, cable television is to me in this brave new world! TV is my lord and savior! Pretty menacing, eh? I could be obsessed with YouTube videos on my parents’ phones like a normal five-year-old, but instead I worship television that you pay $150 a month for and it comes on at a specific time of day, like I’m 55 and have never been ‘good with computers.’ That’s pretty menacing too, in its own way.”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith and Gasoline Alley, 11/15/21

I’m not sure if there’s some kind of upcoming anniversary involving one or both of these absurdly long-running strips that has prompted them to simultaneously acknowledge one another, and I don’t care to do the research to find out. I choose to believe that this is just the equivalent of two people who are by far the oldest at a party clocking each other and giving one another a silent nod of acknowledgment. Anyway, it’s too bad Jughaid is unaware of Archie Comics’ Jughead Jones, himself a character who’s been around almost as long as the Hootin’ Holler cast of Snuffy Smith, because I’m sure a lot more people are familiar with him than they are with Sheezix, at least until Gasoline Alley finally gets a CW sitcom of its very own. On the other hand, Jughaid is lucky that he and his fellow Holler residents exist forever in an ageless comic-book time, unlike folks in Gasoline Alley, who are trapped in a hell where they age in real time but their strip will never be cancelled and they will never be allowed to die.

Hi and Lois and Hagar the Horrible, 11/15/21

Bowls of barf? Vikings tossing a severed pig’s head around, for fun? Looks like this is the week when Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC realized that nobody really cares what you put in the newspaper anymore, and they’re gonna run with it.

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The Lockhorns, 10/20/21

If you’re reading this blog, I assume you’ve dedicated at least a little bit of your brain space to the question of why Leroy and Loretta, who demonstrably do not love each other, or like each other, or derive any pleasure from each other’s company, continue to stay married in this era of relatively easy-to-obtain no-fault divorce. They have no children that they’re staying together for, Loretta’s mother hates Leroy, Leroy has no family to speak of, they don’t seem to have any social circle that would be disrupted by a separation, so what are we missing? Presumably the depth of their dysfunction is so great that that they feel psychologically bound to one another, each of them profoundly unhappy but also unable to conceive of life without the other and the pain they receive and dish out by turns. Today, we see a key part of this dynamic: each Lockhorn must occasionally offer the other the free choice to leave or stay, the opportunity to head out the door and never return. Or to come back, if they want, and walk into the future together, hand in unlovable hand.

Mary Worth, 10/20/21

I’m extremely unsettled by the frankly erotic way that Wilbur is eyeing the discolored piece of meat (?) at the end of his fork in panel two. Wilbur can’t deal with salsa dancing, and we all know why, but if there are limits to his digestive system’s ability to process garbage, he hasn’t found them yet.

Funky Winkerbean, 10/20/21

It’s genuinely weird that Mason’s Lisa’s Story production had a wrap party but not even an extremely modest premiere party for the cast and crew, and even weirder that Les and Cayla didn’t even get a copy of the movie to watch. It’s also pretty weird that the Valentine Theater simultaneously was on the verge of failure in 2017 when Max was in his late 30s and then subsequently closed in 2021 when Max was in his late 20s, but let’s not dwell on Funkyverse chronology and think instead about how Les casually adds “or something” at the end of his last sentence here while cringing away from Cayla, as if he doesn’t know exactly where this strip club is and what its hours are. Now, a lot of Funkyverse characters would go to this strip club and talk loudly while getting a lap dance about how you used to be able to see classic serials like Radio Ranch there, but Les I’m sure approaches things with more dignity (he sits silently and contemplates the fact that the Valentine failed and took its owners’ dreams with it, just like everything else good in the world, because that’s what sex is, to him).

Shoe, 10/20/21

In the world of Shoe, birds hold down various human-style jobs, like publishing a newspaper, running a diner, working in a mortuary, running a dating service, and so on. Today we learn that fish in this universe have jobs too, or at least one job: to go to a lake and get murdered.